Templar Battleforce Proves that Looks Aren’t Everything
With the current boom in indie game development, it can be harder than ever to spot the diamonds in the rough. Since development is more accessible than ever, the market is flooded with games, most of which don’t have the luxury of an art department or the kind of budget that would allow a drawn-out design process. That means finding the hidden gems can be a matter of sifting through hundreds of games that don’t necessarily show their quality in screenshots. Taking chances does sometimes yield great results, though, and for some people, Templar Battleforce from Trese Brothers Games may be one of those games that’s worth the effort.
On the surface, Templar Battleforce doesn’t do much to impress. It’s a top-down turn-based strategy game featuring heavily armored space marines fighting insectoid aliens. All of this is territory so well worn you’re likely to get deja vu, and things don’t get much better from there. The UI is too sparse and what’s there isn’t particularly attractive, character and enemy design is totally uninspired, and navigating the menus in your base can be an unintuitive, unresponsive mess. It’s not always clear what your options are on a given screen or what control options you have, and the menus themselves are just unattractive.
Fans of the Warhammer 40K universe, or really anyone who’s had even casual contact with it, will also notice where Trese Brothers got its design aesthetic. It’s essentially lifted in one piece from the Warhammer franchise, from your characters and their enemies all the way to unit classes, your characters’ vocabulary, and what you can glean of their larger backstory and culture. It bears especial similarity to 2013’s Space Hulk, a Warhammer 40K game based on a much older board game, which is also a top-down strategy game that plays mostly the same as Templar Battleforce, but looks much better.
Why, then, is Templar Battleforce worth playing? Its charms all lie well below its surface, and for the most part, buried under somewhat of a time investment.
To be honest, Templar Battleforce doesn’t start off well. A cheap-looking cutscene plays, introducing players to a vague threat with stilted dialogue and abysmal animations. Players then take charge of their first character and shortly build a small squad for a tutorial mission of sorts. The gameplay is oppressively slow, broken up by tutorial hints that are sometimes too obvious, sometimes a bit unclear, and often come a turn or two after they would have been most useful. The UI is far from perfect, as well, with information that most games consider crucial on the battlefield – movement range, chance to hit, etc. – inexplicably missing. Combat also continues to play out slowly even with the tutorials out of the way. Animations are long yet crude, and there’s no option to speed them up. The units themselves aren’t anything to look at, either, and enemy variety is severely lacking. The maps for the most part are interesting, though it can be hard to pick out details such as stairs or buttons.
The game only starts to show its promise once players get their first glimpse of their base. Upgrading units requires navigating the aforementioned dismal menus, but with a few upgrade points it starts to become clear that stat and gear investments are going to make a massive difference in how units behave in combat.
Even more customization is possible through a separate upgrade tree that makes alterations to the army as a whole. This upgrade tree is a sprawling, frankly bewildering mass of new units to unlock and abilities to enhance. At first glance, it seems impenetrable, but after some study it too reveals that the changes to be made here will have a hugely meaningful impact later on. Investing points in one unit type will necessarily prevent others from reaching their full potential, just as upgrading one stat on a particular unit limits how effectively they’ll perform other tasks.
If this all sounds fairly standard, it is, but what make it unique is just how much these decisions matter. The difference that each individual upgrade makes is immediately noticeable in combat, and the effect only grows with more investment. Players make upgrade choices that will effectively change the role of various units in the game, not just add a few points of damage here or defense there.
Templar Battleforce demands a lot from players. It’s simply unsatisfying in a large number of ways, from its stale writing to lackluster appearance, but for those who are fans of the genre and willing to invest the time, it can be very rewarding. What Templar Battleforce does better than nearly any other game in recent memory is make players’ choices truly matter, not in how the story plays out, but in how the game itself unfolds.
On the surface, Templar Battleforce doesn’t do much to impress. It’s a top-down turn-based strategy game featuring heavily armored space marines fighting insectoid aliens. All of this is territory so well worn you’re likely to get deja vu, and things don’t get much better from there. The UI is too sparse and what’s there isn’t particularly attractive, character and enemy design is totally uninspired, and navigating the menus in your base can be an unintuitive, unresponsive mess. It’s not always clear what your options are on a given screen or what control options you have, and the menus themselves are just unattractive.
Fans of the Warhammer 40K universe, or really anyone who’s had even casual contact with it, will also notice where Trese Brothers got its design aesthetic. It’s essentially lifted in one piece from the Warhammer franchise, from your characters and their enemies all the way to unit classes, your characters’ vocabulary, and what you can glean of their larger backstory and culture. It bears especial similarity to 2013’s Space Hulk, a Warhammer 40K game based on a much older board game, which is also a top-down strategy game that plays mostly the same as Templar Battleforce, but looks much better.
Why, then, is Templar Battleforce worth playing? Its charms all lie well below its surface, and for the most part, buried under somewhat of a time investment.
To be honest, Templar Battleforce doesn’t start off well. A cheap-looking cutscene plays, introducing players to a vague threat with stilted dialogue and abysmal animations. Players then take charge of their first character and shortly build a small squad for a tutorial mission of sorts. The gameplay is oppressively slow, broken up by tutorial hints that are sometimes too obvious, sometimes a bit unclear, and often come a turn or two after they would have been most useful. The UI is far from perfect, as well, with information that most games consider crucial on the battlefield – movement range, chance to hit, etc. – inexplicably missing. Combat also continues to play out slowly even with the tutorials out of the way. Animations are long yet crude, and there’s no option to speed them up. The units themselves aren’t anything to look at, either, and enemy variety is severely lacking. The maps for the most part are interesting, though it can be hard to pick out details such as stairs or buttons.
The game only starts to show its promise once players get their first glimpse of their base. Upgrading units requires navigating the aforementioned dismal menus, but with a few upgrade points it starts to become clear that stat and gear investments are going to make a massive difference in how units behave in combat.
Even more customization is possible through a separate upgrade tree that makes alterations to the army as a whole. This upgrade tree is a sprawling, frankly bewildering mass of new units to unlock and abilities to enhance. At first glance, it seems impenetrable, but after some study it too reveals that the changes to be made here will have a hugely meaningful impact later on. Investing points in one unit type will necessarily prevent others from reaching their full potential, just as upgrading one stat on a particular unit limits how effectively they’ll perform other tasks.
If this all sounds fairly standard, it is, but what make it unique is just how much these decisions matter. The difference that each individual upgrade makes is immediately noticeable in combat, and the effect only grows with more investment. Players make upgrade choices that will effectively change the role of various units in the game, not just add a few points of damage here or defense there.
Templar Battleforce demands a lot from players. It’s simply unsatisfying in a large number of ways, from its stale writing to lackluster appearance, but for those who are fans of the genre and willing to invest the time, it can be very rewarding. What Templar Battleforce does better than nearly any other game in recent memory is make players’ choices truly matter, not in how the story plays out, but in how the game itself unfolds.
